Amaranth Borsuk

Whispering Galleries by Borsuk and Brad Bouse is a 2014 site-specific, interactive, multimedia poetry project that uses a reader’s gestures to transform a local diary into erasure poetry on the screen. As readers gesture over the computer, transcriptions from a diary dissolve as so much digital dust, leaving behind a poem. Through a webcam, the participant’s shadow emerges behind the words, creating a symbolic link between the viewer and the work.

Whispering Galleries was commissioned by Site Projects, a nonprofit that supports artistic works. The project was also supported by The New Haven Free Public Library and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Originally displayed at the New Haven Free Public Library on April 26, 2014, it later went on to be exhibited at The Institute Library in New Haven (2014), The International Symposium on Electronic Art at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver (2015), and “You | I: Interfaces & Reader Experience” at the Paul Watkins Gallery, Winona State University (2016). It is available online. For the full experience, a Chrome browser, a Leap controller, and a webcam are required.

Borsuk was born in Meriden, Connecticut. She is fluent in English, French and Hebrew. Borsuk holds a B.A. in English from the University of California Los Angeles, and an M.A. in English Literature and Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Her work includes poetry (Handiwork, Tonal Saw, Pomegranate Eater), artist books, and collaborative digital projects (Abra, As We Know, Whispering Galleries, Between Page and Screen), and she has a special interest in investigating textual materiality. Borsuk was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT. She has been married to software developer Brad Bouse since 2013, and the couple have one daughter.

Amaranth Borsuk (born 1981) is an American poet and educator known for her experiments with textual materiality and digital poetry. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell's School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, where she teaches undergraduate courses on poetry, philology, and experimental writing alongside co-chairing the school's M.F.A. program in Creative Writing since 2018.